Is PictBridge a scam?

  • Thread starter Thread starter TJ
  • Start date Start date
House Of The White Rose wrote:

Nicolaas Hawkins <[email protected]> wrote in news:[email protected]:



Ansel Adams was hardly your typical, average, run-of-the-mill professional photographer though, was he? Face it, the man was a legend, and as much concerned with technical perfection (think: zone system) as with pictorial perfection - perhaps even more so.



Ansel Adam's also had the luxury of using large format cameras so the view screen was much larger than what we have now. He used a tripod and spent hours setting up for one static shot. We don't have the luxury of a 8x10 or 4x5 viewfinder so it is much harder for us to compose a perfect image with no cropping.

These cameras are still available but few choose to use them.
 
Ansel Adam's also had the luxury of using large format cameras so the view
screen was much larger than what we have now. He used a tripod and spent
hours setting up for one static shot. We don't have the luxury of a 8x10 or
4x5 viewfinder so it is much harder for us to compose a perfect image with
no cropping.
Click to expand...

In that format, his shots would have been composed full-size on a
ground-glass screen rather than minified in a viewfinder. Also in that
format his prints would have been contact prints where cropping would not
have been possible anyway.
 
In my opinion, YES. PictBridge is a method of printing photos directly
from a digital camera, bypassing a computer. It is standardized across
printer and camera brands, which is about the only thing it has going
for it, if you ask me.

I've written it several times before: There are few photos that wouldn't
benefit from a bit of tweaking before being printed. Very often, a bit
of cropping results in a much better photo. The same is true of exposure
adjustment. That's just the basics. Often, it would be nice to remove
something distracting from a scene, like a post or utility cable.
Click to expand...

I typically do all of my cropping in the camera's viewfinder before taking the
picture. Exposure adjustment is usually not necessary either; if I'm shooting
a scene with strong backlight or deep shadows I'll use the camera's spot
meter. Attempting to do too much exposure compensation after the photo is
taken usually results in washed out colors or too much graininess. These
strange habits of mine might come from many years of shooting slide film where
you can't crop or adjust exposure after the fact.

I've taken several thousand photos over the past few years with my DSLR and
printed maybe a hundred or so. I've done minor adjustments to maybe one or two
percent of those before printing them. I've never actually altered a photo by
removing posts or utility cables, nor would I even know how to do this since
I've never played with PhotoShop or GIMP.

All that being said, I do agree with you that PictBridge is a scam. Even
though both my camera (Canon Digital Rebel) and my printer (Canon i9900) do
support PictBridge, I've only ever used it once just to try it. All of my
photo printing is done through the PC because I find it easier to point and
click than to navigate through some quirky menu on a tiny viewfinder.
 
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